Plagiarism screener gets passing grade in copyright lawsuit

iParadigms, the company behind the turnitin plagiarism detection service, has …

Do students have rights to the material they hand in as class assignments? Is plagiarism detection a form of fair use? These and a number of other intriguing questions were answered in a decision (PDF) handed down by a US District Court in Virginia recently, which threw out a lawsuit filed by students whose school compelled them to use an automated plagiarism detection system.

The combination of the Internet and copy-and-paste has made plagiarism easier than it has ever been. iParadigms, the company named in the suit, runs a service called turnitin that allows teachers and professors to automate the process of plagiarism detection. Students can submit their work online to turnitin, which will then produce an "originality report" based on comparisons with known material. Over 7,000 schools have signed contracts with the service, which now handles over 100,000 documents daily.

In addition to comparing submissions with material on the Internet, turnitin manages an internal database of materials. The contract agreements many schools sign allow the company to populate this database with materials submitted by their students. The students involved in this case went to one such school, and they claimed that this agreement infringed the copyrights to their own work, given that parts of their essays could resurface whenever similar text appeared in future reports generated by turnitin.

Judge Claude M. Hilton went through the students' arguments methodically and found them all wanting. To use the service at all, the students had to agree to a clickthrough statement that absolved iParadigms from legal liability, and the decision notes that, "many courts have found clickwrap agreements to be enforceable." The students had tried to get around this by attaching a disclaimer to the material they submitted, but Hilton noted that the agreement had no provisions for disclaimers.

The suit also tried to argue that the agreement was invalid on a couple of grounds. It suggested that it was unenforceable due to their status as minors, but the court noted that minors can't legally renege on a contract that has been fulfilled; in this case, the students got their originality report, and it was used by their school. Their lawyers claimed that the agreement was entered under duress—the school requires the report before grades are issued—but the law doesn't appear to recognize duress applied by third parties. In any case, the duress that was applied fell far short of the standard of "an unlawful or wrongful act."

Even if the contract hadn't been binding, the decision concluded that the use of student submissions for plagiarism detection fell well within the bounds of fair use. Citing the Perfect 10 vs. Google case, Hilton found that iParadigm's use of the students' essays was transformative and valuable. In contrast, student essays in their normal form were viewed as having no market, and their reuse by turnitin did not in any way diminish the students' "incentive for creativity"—namely, their grades.

iParadigms tried to play hardball and filed a countersuit based on the fact that one of the students submitted a report under false pretenses, using the account information of a UCSD student. Hilton decided that iParadigms wasn't harmed by the deception, and threw those claims out, too. With everything handled by summary judgement, the case is over unless any party decides to appeal.